First ProNetics GoKart contest

Rome, 24th February 2006 time 10:15 PM

On the last thursday Daniele organized the first one ProNetics GoKart contest. Only 6 of us have found the courage to partecipate. Only six proneticsians plus Riccardo (my friend) and Andrea (Daniele's friend)...

The track choosen was the HolyKart (http://www.holykartroma.it), a full rubberized track with perfect equilibrated karts in performances. HolyKart is very professional to simulate a true Grand Prix:

• 10 minutes of free practices
• 10 minutes of qualify, valid for the starting grid
• 8 turns for the real race where anything could happens...
  

I preput that I never see a Kart before and in facts in the free practices my position was the fourth. Then in the qualify my position was go up until the first one, just a blow better than Spizzi.

In the final race after the firs

t one curve I didn't see anyone and it's finished with my kart that cutted the winning post and Spizzi second after 12,79 seconds... and Blade (Daniele) at 17,27... At the end there was the prize giving with podium and medals!

The day after, for the entire day, on my chest flamed the gold medal. I'm forgetting...everybody how wants can ask me free drive lessons... Muahahah Muahaha

See you to the next GoKart contest!

Rome, 19th february 2006.
The persistence aspect finally works! Now Roma Framework can search and create persistent object in transparent way. I've used the latest JPOX JDO implementation.

I've implemented the CRUD pattern and it works very well with Echo2 and its Ajax model reloading the resulting table without refreshing the page. Cool...

I've also changed the inheritance use of forms. Before all forms are derived strictly by the model, but now I've tested it's better create POJO forms and using domain objects per composition. Before:

class AccountNew extends Account
{
private String confirmPassword;
}

Now:

class AccountNew extends CRUDNew
{
private Account newValue;
private String confirmPassword;
}

The main reasons of this change are:

• Persistence aspect can confuse the derived non-persistent class used for view
• Can extend the pattern POJOs (like the CRUD, see above)

I hope to finish the jdo persistence aspect for this week and enhance the echo2 view aspect. Stay tuned!

Roma Framework: UDM in practice

I've just finished to work at the 0.6.8 beta release of Roma Framework. In the last days I've refactored much classes in Roma Framework and, above all, the plugin architecture has changed in "aspects". Current implemented aspects are:

• view (Echo2ViewAspect),
• i18n (ResourceBundleI18NAspect),
  
• validation (interfaces and exceptions),
  
• content (containing section tree structure),
• logging (using common-logging)
  

Core component has improved with much features:

The UDM (Unified Development Model) has improved with:

• Management of application flow. Each user session is tracked. UDM allows to go back and forward implementing the full MVC2 pattern at component level
• UDM allows to change at run-time class's fields and actions features such as hiding, changing label, style, rendering, etc.
• UDM allows tracking of attributes changed by the Model to be refreshed by the view aspect.
  
• Better FormFactory management allowing caching of forms abstracting the implementation.

Below an example of UDM to search accounts. Note that some features resides in external XML files. The search() method is not yet attached to persistence aspect since it's in construction. Now data are dummy values loaded by TestApp singleton.

public class AccountSearch {
public AccountFilter filter;

@FieldInfo(embeddedType = AccountList.class)
public List result;

public AccountSearch() {
filter = new AccountFilter();
result = new ArrayList();
}

public void create() {
ObjectContext.getInstance().setNext(new AccountNew());
}

public void edit() throws ConfigurationNotFoundException {
ObjectContext.getInstance().getFieldAttribute(filter, "name").setHidden(true);
}

public void search() {
// TEMPORARY: HERE WILL BE USER PERSISTENCE ASPECT SOON...
result = TestApp.getInstance().getAccounts();
ObjectContext.getInstance().addChangedProperty(this, "result");
}
}

Roma: work in progress...

Hi,
the work in Roma framework continue. In this week I've refactored many things. But the most important news is the support for a XSL based front-end. The idea is to implement the FrontEnd interfaces building a dynamic form that generates XML. Before to send the XML to the browser it can be rendered by XSL. In this way there is a very SOC (Separation Of Concerns) and a web designer can work only to XSL and CSS.

My idea is to generate XML compatible with the Apache Cocoon CForms form instance format. In this way you can exchange XSLs between Roma and Cocoon... CForms seems to cover complex widget.

The concept rear the new XML front-end is quite near to the Apache Cocoon framework, but using the same cardinal Roma's concepts:

• Unified Development Model (UDM): the form interaction is 100% object oriented and it's the same as for Echo2 plugin. Soon a tutorial that shows the powerful of OO user interaction.
• Inheritance: everything in Roma is extensibile using the inheritance concept.
• View derived from the model: once architect has developed the domain classes and their relationships, the developer can generate complex and full working forms in some minutes.
• Transparent persistence using JDO 2.0 (JPox implementation) but in the future EJB3.

Stay tuned. I hope to publish the first public release in a couple of weeks.

If you are interested or just want to suggest some idea, please contact me! ;-)